In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
In which I provide a template for generating fancy, production quality tables for theses...
LaTeX as I've mentioned previously, is a document preparation system well known for its brilliant equations and can also be utilised to make very nice looking diagrams. The tables it generates, however, while neat are a little lacklustre. This is aimed as a very simple guide to editing tables (regular LaTeX users may find this tutorial very basic).
In which I discuss getting footnotes and Mendeley references to look nice in Word...
I may not have mentioned it before on this blog but I am a Mendeley advisor and a strong advocate of this free reference manager. In fact I cover the pros and cons of it in this video:
In which I improve upon the previous post...
In yesterday's post I talked about using MetaPost to generate Pulse Sequence Diagrams for MRI documents. I have been using this to make nice diagrams for my Thesis. There is one problem, however, with the pulse sequence file provided on Mark's website - it generates square gradients.
In which I use MetaPost to generate publication quality pulse sequence diagrams...
Pulse sequences are the series of radio-frequency pulses required to generate an MR image. If you are an MR Physicist you will see these a lot and probably wondered how can I generate nice pulse sequences for my thesis, papers etc. Well handily using MetaPost and these files you can!
In which I bake another, more ambitious, MRI scanner cake...
The ISBE annual BBQ was on Friday so I had to once again attempt to bake an MRI scanner cake. I decided to go for a more realistic one than previously.
The basic cake is made using Delia's All-in-one Sponge recipe and then things get a little crazy as I make 4 of them.
In which I describe the components of an MRI scanner...
So following on from last week – other than a lot of money to pay for it all*, what do you need for an operational MRI scanner?
*Scanners are often upward of several million pounds.
In order to make a significant number of the spins in your body align in one direction a very powerful magnet is needed. The strength of these magnets is measured by a large unit called the Tesla (symbol: T). To get an appreciation of how strong that is there is another unit called the gauss which is also used to measure magnetic fields. 1 Tesla = 10,000 gauss and a normal bar magnet is around 100 gauss.
In which I post a really late cake...
Apologies for further lack of tea - reviews will be coming next week I promise :)
2 years ago, just as I had started this blog*, I had to go to a departmental barbecue and they asked people to make cakes - this is what I did!
*before I posted regularly.
In which I explain the very basics of MRI...
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) allows us to detect a signal due to a fundamental quantum property of atoms - spin (which I will explain in an upcoming post). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) uses these same principles to obtain images of (usually) hydrogen atoms in a substance/tissue.
(N)MRI is a non-invasive, non-ionising, imaging modality and is widely used in hospitals worldwide. What does all that mean?
In which I apologise for this week being low on blog posts and update you on my AstraZeneca placement. Also I use software I normally use for research for other purposes.I'm sorry there haven't been any updates this week. There was no cake made as I had no time for choir on Tuesday, no tea as it's an alternate week and the usual Thor update is delayed (pending a hot wire cutter).
This week I started my work placement at AstraZeneca, the industrial part of my Industrial CASE PhD (see my post on PhD types). Apart from the system shock due to waking up significantly earlier than usual (my commute to UoM is a 15-20 min walk not a 45-60 min drive) the week has been good so far :) I've gone through a load of induction sessions and lots of positive feedback on my study designs and planning for the weeks ahead.
Next week I start work proper with my first study and hopefully the results will be as we predict. Sadly for now I can't give any more details due to confidentiality agreements. Rest assured though if I get a publication out of this placement (which I hope I will) it will be mentioned in this blog :)
On Monday night I managed to take a good set of photos of fellow Scout leader and Networker (Womble) walking ominously towards my camera. I used ImageJ a free, java based image tool commonly used by MRI researchers to animate this simple gif:
Weeping Womble (640)
After fixing some timing issues, adding 'blinks' and a final word of warning I ended up with this final masterpiece of internet animation:
Weeping Womble Final (640)
Proof that research software can be quite fun in your spare time!
Tom Out!
P.S. AstraZeneca
P.P.S ImageJ
